Abstract
Strong public support is a prerequisite for ambitious and thus costly climate change mitigation policy, and strong public concern over climate change is a prerequisite for policy support. Why, then, do most public opinion surveys indicate rather high levels of concern and rather strong policy support, while de facto mitigation efforts in most countries remain far from ambitious? One possibility is that survey measures for public concern fail to fully reveal the true attitudes of citizens due to social desirability bias. In this paper, we implemented list-experiments in representative surveys in Germany and the United States (N = 3620 and 3640 respectively) to assess such potential bias. We find evidence that people systematically misreport, that is, understate their disbelief in human caused climate change. This misreporting is particularly strong amongst politically relevant subgroups. Individuals in the top 20% of the income distribution in the United States and supporters of conservative parties in Germany exhibit significantly higher climate change skepticism according to the list experiment, relative to conventional measures. While this does not definitively mean that climate skepticism is a widespread phenomenon in these countries, it does suggest that future research should reconsider how climate change concern is measured, and what subgroups of the population are more susceptible to misreporting and why. Our findings imply that public support for ambitious climate policy may be weaker than existing survey research suggests.
Highlights
Decarbonizing the global energy supply system, which will be required to maintain global warming within 1.5–2 degrees Celsius, requires governmental policy-interventions that reach far into the daily lives of most people
Upon direct questioning a very small proportion of Germans expresses climate change skepticism (4 percent), whereas the list experiment produces an estimate that is three times larger, a difference of 9.3% (95% confidence interval 1.9–16.4%) with covariate adjustment. These differences between the two countries are likely to reflect different positions of mainstream political parties toward climate change, with the issue of climate change being polarized in the United States [24, 25]
We find evidence of significant misreporting of climate change skepticism in two countries that play a key role in global climate policy, and within politically relevant sub-groups in these two countries
Summary
Decarbonizing the global energy supply system, which will be required to maintain global warming within 1.5–2 degrees Celsius, requires governmental policy-interventions that reach far into the daily lives of most people. In democratic political systems, but to a significant degree in non-democratic systems, such policy-interventions are virtually impossible to enact and implement effectively without high levels of support from or at least acceptance by the mass public, which acts both as consumers and citizens. Current surveys may underestimate climate change skepticism: Evidence from list experiments in Germany and USA
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